Nor age so eat up my invention. [ William Shakespeare ]

Necessity, the mother of Invention. [ Wycherly ]

Electric telegraphs, printing, gas,
Tobacco, balloons, and steam.
Are little events that have come to pass
Since the days of the old regime.
And, spite of Lempriere's dazzling page,
I'd give - though it might seem bold -
A hundred years of the Golden Age
For a year of the Age of Gold. [ Henry S. Leigh ]

Necessity - thou best of peacemakers,
As well as surest promoter of invention. [ Scott ]

Then, rising with Aurora's light,
The muse invoked, sit down to write;
Blot out, correct, insert, refine.
Enlarge, diminish, interline;
Be mindful, when invention fails.
To scratch your head and bite your nails. [ Swift ]

Invention is totally independent of the will. [ B. R. Haydon ]

The invention all admired, and each, how he
To be the inventor missed; so easy it seemed,
Once found, which yet unfound most would have thought
Impossible. [ Milton ]

Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age. [ Swift ]

Sin every day takes out a patent for some new invention. [ Whipple ]

Invention is not so much the result of labor as of judgment. [ Roscommon ]

Divine nature gave the fields, man's invention built the cities. [ Varro ]

Hunger is the teacher of the arts, and the bestower of invention. [ Persius ]

Etiquette is the invention of wise men to keep fools at a distance. [ Steele ]

Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention. [ Colton ]

Oh for a muse of fire that would ascend the highest heaven of invention! [ William Shakespeare ]

Oft in dreams invention we bestow to change a flounce or add a furbelow. [ Pope ]

Galileo called doubt the father of invention; it is certainly the pioneer. [ Bovee ]

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. [ Emerson ]

Necessity may be the mother of lucrative, but is the death of poetical invention. [ Shenstone ]

Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren. [ Burke ]

Necessity, thou art the best of peacemaker, as well as the surest prompter of invention. [ Scott ]

The art of painting does not proceed so much by intelligence as by sight and feeling and invention. [ Hamerton ]

If a man can play the true logician, and have judgment as well as invention, he may do great matters. [ Lord Bacon ]

The introduction of noble inventions seems to hold by far the most excellent place among human actions. [ Bacon ]

Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty, the power of appreciating beauty. [ Margaret Fuller Ossoli ]

A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. [ Emerson ]

Since the invention of printing no state can now any longer be formed purely, slowly, and by degrees from itself. [ Jean Paul ]

The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. [ Samuel Johnson ]

Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors, but they are seldom or never inventors. [ Voltaire ]

Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. [ Thomas Paine ]

Invention is activity of mind, as fire is air in motion; a sharpening of the spiritual sight, to discern hidden aptitudes. [ Tupper ]

There should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric; and pure invention is but the talent of a deceiver. [ Byron ]

It is the greatest invention man has ever made, this of marking down the unseen thought that is in him by written characters. [ Carlyle ]

The highest exercise of invention has nothing to do with fiction; but is an invention of new truth, what we can call a revelation. [ Carlyle ]

As ceremony is the invention of wise men to keep fools at a distance, so good breeding is an expedient to make fools and wise men equal. [ Steele ]

Necessity, oftener than facility, has been the mother of invention; and the most prolific school of all has been the school of difficulty. [ Samuel Smiles ]

From my father inherit I stature and the earnest conduct of life; from motherkin my cheerful disposition and pleasure in fanciful invention. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, of himself ]

New or Novel? New and novel are sometimes used indiscriminately. New is opposed to old, novel to known; as, a new house, a novel invention. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]

There is not less wit, nor less invention, in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. [ Pierre Boyle ]

Neither is it safe to count upon the weakness of any man's understanding, who is thoroughly possessed of the spirit of revenge to sharpen his invention. [ Swift ]

Can that which is the greatest virtue in philosophy, doubt (called by Galileo the father of invention), be in religion what the priests term it, the greatest of sins? [ Bovee ]

All the makers of dictionaries, all the compilers of opinions already printed, we may term plagiarists, but honest plagiarists, who arrogate not the merit of invention. [ Voltaire ]

A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

Nothing, in truth, has such a tendency to weaken not only the powers of invention, but the intellectual powers in general, as a habit of extensive and various reading without reflection. [ Dugald Stewart ]

The great inventor is one who has walked forth upon the industrial world, not from universities, but from hovels; not as clad in silks and decked with honors, but as clad in fustian and grimed with soot and oil. [ Isaac Taylor ]

I believe that everyone, sometime or other, dreams that he is reading papers, books, or letters; in which case the invention prompts so readily that the mind is imposed upon, and mistakes its own suggestions for the composition of another. [ Addison ]

Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory. Nothing can be made of nothing; he who has laid up no material can produce no combinations. [ Sir J. Reynolds ]

The golden hour of invention must terminate like other hours; and when the man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of life, his companions behold him as one of themselves, - the creature of habits and infirmities. [ Isaac Disraeli ]

All the makers of dictionaries, all compilers who do nothing else than repeat backwards and forwards the opinions, the errors, the impostures, and the truths already printed, we may term plagiarists: but honest plagiarists, who arrogate not the merit of invention. [ Voltaire ]

His eloquent tongue so well seconds his fertile invention that no one speaks better when suddenly called forth. His attention never languishes; his mind is always before his words; his memory has all its stock so turned into ready money that, without hesitation or delay, it supplies whatever the occasion may require. [ Erasmus ]

It is frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times, Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as the need is. [ Emerson ]

The invention of printing added a new element of power to the race. From that hour, in a most especial sense, the brain and not the arm, the thinker and not the soldier, books and not kings, were to rule the world; and weapons, forged in the mind, keen-edged and brighter than the sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and the battle-axe. [ Whipple ]

Founders and senators of states and cities, lawgivers, extirpers of tyrants, fathers of the people, and other eminent persons in civil government, were honored but with titles of worthies or demigods; whereas such as were inventors and authors of new arts, endowments, and commodities towards man's life, were ever consecrated among the gods themselves. [ Bacon ]

A man that is young in years may be old in hours, if he have lost no time; but that happeneth rarely. Generally, youth is like the first cogitations, not so wise as the second; for there is a youth in thoughts as well as in ages; and yet the invention of young men is more lively than that of old, and imaginations stream into their minds better, and, as it were, more divinely. [ Bacon ]